The first John Deere equipment we had was a pull-type combine that Grandpa Cles bought to use on the farm. In the early 60's, the engine finally was finished, and to fix it was too expensive, so my dad bought a 55 Hillside combine.
The older one, pulled by a Caterpillar tractor that my dad drove, was not one that could do hillsides, unless you adjusted things by hand. The new combine was an incredible improvement, because hydraulics took care of most things. The old one even needed you to make an adjustment with a large wheel, that looked like a captains wheel on the deck of a ship. And even the old one I describe was better than the former threshing machines that required farmers to bag the wheat.
Within a few years, the 55 Hillside was too small, both in terms of engine capacity and cutter bar width. My dad bought a 95 Hillside. When he first owned it, it didn't have a cab on it. Like he had done on the older combine, he did some work and made something to shield the sun from his neck and arms while driving the machine and standing looking down at the cutter bar. You had to watch carefully for rocks.
This is in the first years of owning the 95 Hillside when dad made something to protect him from the sun. I drove the grain truck, because I couldn't get into the dust.
I had severe allergies, so by the time I was in ninth grade, dad installed a cab with a Crenlo Cooler. Cles remembers it, because it pumped water from a tank mounted on the side of the grain tank, and occasionally when climbing a steep hill or even going down one, water would slop out and soak the driver. The water often was a mixture of dust and chaff, so it was not comfortable at all, and the sheer surprise usually resulted in my launching a tirade of cursing. Cles still teases me about that and laughs at the memory.
Our family always placed the strength of our success in the quality of equipment we owned, and that remained with my father as well. The truck at the right was one that Wards purchased during World War II. It was impossible to get equipment like that, but Great Grandpa Ward had connections, and they not only needed it for the farm, but the country needed to see that capable farmers had the machinery to provide grain at that difficult time. The picture shows Grandma Liza and Grandpa Cles while they were young in front of the International grain truck.
That same truck appears here in this picture. I'm guessing it is from '49 or so. Grandpa Cles bought two Chevrolet trucks to use within a few years of that, and we used them until 1964 when dad bought a new Chevrolet two ton truck.
We also had John Deere grain drills and an old offset plow, which we seldom used except twice. Both times were due to rainy spring weather. In fact, the first time was when the Beatles released the Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band album. It was a sad year because of a drowning of a young high school sophomore I knew. I was only two years younger than he was at the time, and it left a lasting impression.
By the time school ended, the bad weather had prevented my father from finishing spring plowing, so we began as soon as the ground was dry enough. The weeds were almost a foot tall on the fields, so we had to disk everything, and the disk only had an eight foot swath. We went morning and night. I would begin at six a.m. and plow all day. Dad would bring me lunch, drive the tractor while I ate in the truck, and then I would begin again and plow until 10:00 or 11:00 at night. Dad would then take the night shift after only getting a couple of hours sleep and working all day on other things on the farm. I would drive to the field the next day, greasing and servicing the tractor and getting plowing started as close to 6:00 a.m. as possible. This went for over a week before we finished the large field we called 19 Hollow (Holler).
The picture of the 95 Hillside shows the Crenlo Cooler on the side. The air filter was at the top of the cab, and we changed that a couple of times during harvest, but the filters in the cooler tank on the side was something we changed every day. It screened out all the dirt and chaff, and it kept the air clean and allowed me to harvest grain without severe allergic reactions.
The bats on the cutter bar also had metal fingers that caught grain that would tend to be weighted down with heavy heads of grain. At the back was a straw catching attachment called a Foster Wagon. It caught all of the straw and a bit of grain that was light or cracked that came out through the machine. We left those in some fields, especially barley fields, and dad would let the cattle feed on them as long as possible. He kept a bulldozer close to the field where he kept it, and when he had the cattle in one field several miles from the house, he would ride the horse there, start the crawler and doze a path for the cattle to straw piles. When the snow became too deep, he would ride to the tractor, and drive it home. I think he put the saddle on the hood of the dozer. The horse would follow, since there was no feed in the deep snow, and he would stop occasionally to call the cattle.
We trained the cattle to hear our voices, because during the winter, we sometimes fed them cotton seed cake pellets. He would call cattle out from the cedars where they found shelter from wind and snow.
"Sook cows!" he would call. He would do that for five or ten minutes, and suddenly you could hear them mooing and coming out of the trees. That's how my dad would get them to follow him in the dozer too. When he arrived at the house, he put them in an area where we fed them that had good drainage, usually a sidehill.
Feeding cattle was a thing my family has done since our beginnings in England. The Ward family were landowners and diplomats, and since my family was not much in favor of diplomacy when dealing with problems, I assume that these ancients, who were Norman Lords, were also landowners and farmers. The things they knew about working the land were traditions handed down from father to son for a long time. They were things like planting only when the moon was growing or being able to predict oncoming storms.
So John Deere products were a tradition that began in my family with my Grandpa Cles in the forties or earlier.
Great Grandpa Ward is in the photograph at the left, showing a picture of the 10,000 bushel bin they put up during World War II. It was almost impossible to get things like that during those years, but they managed it. The elevator was not ideal, because there was always a bit of spoilage, but we used that bin right up until the late 80's. By then, we had other bins we preferred to use, and we used this one only when we needed additional storage, and that may have happened in 1990.
And now we've come full circle. Cles has a mower, the large industrial one that is more durable than you can buy in most stores like a Home Depot.
It was fun to see Cles on that mower when I was in Virginia this summer, not only because it is something I have also wanted to own for the same "family tradition" reasons, but also because it looks fun to operate.
I once had a professor at ISU. We read Hardy's Tess of the d 'Urbervilles, and at one point during a discussion, we talked about farmers feeding sheaves of grain into a threshing machine and how these crude people never had a connection to the land. The man truly loved Victorian Literature, but he obviously had never worked the land--either using only horses or the "vices" of Industrial Age machinery, because the dumb a$$ will never understand what it means to feel that connection, whether or not you grip a steering wheel or reins of a plow horse. My son understands, and I always will.
And I envy his owning a "green" machine.
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